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All she wanted was to earn enough money to build a well for her family in Vavuniya..... Kumudini Hettiarachchi reports on this maid’s harrowing experience

With fistfuls of dollars, the Middle East beckons the hapless and humble women of Sri Lanka. These women -- wives and mothers -- leave the country’s shores with visions of returning with gold and goods. They hope to build brand new homes, equip them with wide-screen colour TVs (even though some of them may not even have electricity in their villages), large refrigerators, blenders and cookers.

But for Selvakumar Sounthararani from Vavuniya it was a much simpler yearning – a few pails of precious water daily for her family.
Lebanon beckoned and even though her husband was opposed, her eldest son urged her to go. It would be only for two years that she would have to undergo hardship.

Why Lebanon? Another woman from her remote village in Madura Kulam had been there and had sent a lot of money back home. But, of course, her husband had frittered away all the money.

Sounthararani would, however, be wiser. Contacting an agent in Vavuniya, preparations were underway for this 36-year-old mother of five, the youngest being just four years old, to leave for Lebanon. With no passport and cash to pay the agent, money had to be secured by handing over the deed of their tiny eight-perch land on which their home of brick and takarang is built, for Rs. 10,000.

“Life was a struggle before I left for Lebanon. We thought my hardships as a housemaid would allow us to lead a better life. My husband is in the elawalu business,” she says explaining that Selvakumar gets some money from the vegetable traders in Vavuniya town, boards a bus to Kandy or Matale, buys tomatoes, brinjals and manioc there and brings them back for the traders.

It was not a regular income. When she decided to take the gamble of going abroad last year, their children, two boys and three girls, were 19, 17, 15, 14 and 4. They needed food, clothes, books, shoes……. “I married when I was just 14 years old,” she recalls, smilingly adding, “Love karala bende.” The children came soon after. “When they were babies we could manage but as they grew older, life became a struggle.”

Sorrow struck too. Her fourth, daughter Lokendini, was diagnosed with cancer in the thyroid. The lump appeared when she was three, but they didn’t have the money to take her to hospital. Finally, when they did take her to the Kilinochchi Hospital, they were directed to the Cancer Hospital in Maharagama where an operation was performed. It kept recurring, compelling them to come to Maharagama often, causing further dents in their already meagre family budget.

All this was bearable until the third, Kajendani, attained age in 2000. The worries began then, for they had to go more than a mile for their water….for cooking, washing or bathing.

With no money to buy books and clothes, by that time their eldest boy had left school, earning a living working in an aluminium shop.

When the date was set, July 9, 2005, her eldest son accompanied Sounthararani to the airport. In Lebanon, it was a house of four that she had to work in.

A couple and two children. With no knowledge of the language, life was tough. She had to sleep out on a balcony, in the cold, on the second floor. The leftovers were her meals and those consisted of pieces of rotti and some vegetables, mainly fried brinjal. “I longed for rice and even one curry,” says Sounthararani. The apartment was large and she had to do all the cleaning including the five bathrooms daily, then cut up the vegetables for the Madam to cook the food. Whenever, the Madam left the apartment Sounthararani would be locked in with access only to the kitchen and the balcony. “The fridge was always locked,” she says and there was hardly any food. “It was near-starvation for me.” Another Sri Lankan housemaid close by would bundle up a little cooked rice and vegetable and throw it up to her on and off.

She also did not get a single piece of clothing from the Madam. “They did not beat me or scold me. But they made me work very hard,” says Sounthararani explaining that she went to sleep on a sponge spread on the floor very late at night and was up at the crack of dawn. There were no breaks during the day, neither did she have a day off for the week.

The agreed wage was US$ 100 (a little more than Rs. 10,000) and when the Madam offered her the money, she requested her to keep it and give her the full collection at the end of her contract period which was two years.

A year passed. Though she missed her husband and children, she kept at her job.

In July, she had glimpses of war, whenever she passed the room where the Madam watched TV. She also heard the sound of bombs in the distance, like faint rumbles of thunder. One day Madam packed her bags, locked up Sounthararani in the house and left with the family. She had finished her morning tasks and was cleaning the balcony, when she saw planes flying low overhead.

Suddenly the building shook and she heard a “sutu-sutu” noise from the other building and watched horror-stricken as that building collapsed. She also heard people screaming, “Allah, Allah”.

When she woke up she was in hospital and pieced together what had happened to her from the others around her. As the balcony on which she was standing crumbled, she had fallen, getting trapped beneath the rubble. Pillars had pinioned her arms and both were broken.

A Red Cross team had pulled her out of the debris and taken her to hospital, half dead. An appeal on TV about an unidentified Sri Lankan who was badly injured had resulted in an outpouring of support from the Sri Lankans living in the area.

Madam’s sister too had arrived and when Sounthararani asked her for her year’s wages had insisted that it would not be enough to cover hospital expenses, which she had claimed would amount to about US$ 4,000.

Four urgent operations were needed for each hand. The calculations were hard and brutal. Sounthararani’s year’s wages of a little over US$ 1,000 had been given to the hospital along with some insurance cover of another US$ 2,000, she had claimed. They were still short of US$ 1,000 and in answer to Sounthararani’s desperate plea, the Sri Lankans had passed the hat around chipping in with five dollars here and ten dollars there, to make up the balance.

The rest of Sounthararani’s saga is similar to that of hundreds of Sri Lankans -- after the stint in hospital being taken to the Sri Lankan Embassy and then put on a flight back home. “The embassy staff were very kind and considerate and did much for me,” says a grateful Sounthararani.

Now back home with an insurance claim pending (Sahana – Item No. C237649), which Sounthararani believes will only be paid in about a year, she says, “I don’t know how much I may get”.

“I begged for just US$ 50 from Madam’s sister. She refused. I came back without a cent,” laments Sounthararani.

With visions of a little bundle of dollars receding into the past…….so does her hope for water. Sounthararani wanted only Rs. 100,000 to drill a tube well near her home, so that her daughters who are young girls now need not go in search of this basic necessity.